


this human creature

by knowyourwayinthedark



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/F, Gen, Robots, Shippy if you Squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-22 21:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2521847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knowyourwayinthedark/pseuds/knowyourwayinthedark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>How can a being composed of calculations be so guileless? Favourite wonders.</em>
</p><p>Fantine is a robot. Favourite isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this human creature

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carmarthen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/gifts).



When Tholomyes and Blachevelle bring her along the first time – the day their respective quartets, like the gears of a clock, finally slot neatly into place – Favourite blinks, turns her head; then, after a long, slow look, glances away again decisively.

“It is very fashionable these days, to have a mechanical companion,” is all she says. Dahlia and Zephine nod swiftly, their opinions molding immediately to hers, malleable as warm plastic.

“Come now, don’t be like that.” Blachevelle sits beside her. “Tholomyes met her just the other day – she is quite sweet, we had thought to introduce you.”

Tholomyes throws one arm around her shoulder. “Look, Favourite – we have been feeling distinctly unbalanced, us four men but with only three beautiful ladies, one cannot help but feel left out. She completes the set. She allows for all to feel satisfied. Only say hello. She is quite lovely.”

The girl approaches, and Favourite looks again, she cannot help it. For Tholomyes is right. The girl is beautiful. Limbs made with thought given to proportion and posture, a luminescent skin-shell, the texturing brush carefully applied to produce a rosy glow. Eyes glowing with the blue light of an inner engine, that same light shining through the joints of her long, delicate fingers. A mouthpiece of finest ceramic, pearlescent white. And gold, gold everywhere, her headpiece shimmering in the seedy barroom lights, changing every garish neon glare of red and blue and green to the same kind of opalescent glimmering gold.

She extends her hand, the whirring of gears a soft, imperceptible buzz. Favourite eyes it warily, then takes it. It is strangely warm, not quite like a human’s blood-throb heat, and smooth.

“I am Favourite,” she says.

The robot girl’s voice is sweet, too sweet to have come from the modulations of a metal voice-box.

“I am Fantine.”

 

Manufactured in a little factory town, one of those declining settlements near the moon colony, her history uncertain – all manner of important vital documentation lost and buried in corrupted databases – her name given entirely at random. The recent attempts at robot emancipation had let her avoid forced programming, allowing her to enter service in farms and villages as she pleased. But there was little demand for ‘bots of her delicate internal skeleton in the harsh conditions of the moon; she took the shuttle down to the city and there she stayed.

And so Fantine met Tholomyes. He was the first who had paid her any attention, so in her innocence she adored him, refused him nothing. She adored him.

Robots love, Favourite knows, just about the same as persons of flesh and bone. There are internal computations that run, constantly, and left to its own devices a robot develops a personality just the same way as any child might, through experience. Thus, attachments form. Desires to please and flatter, to avoid discomfort and to seek validation.

Friendships form, too. The four of them: Dahlia and Zephine and Favourite and Fantine, daylight finding them investigating the newest fashions from off-planet, or sharing cramped tables in barrooms in the evening, as the sun sets hidden behind the tall towers of the city. Zephine and Dahlia play off each other, chattering like birds, and a caustic word or two from Favourite can have them all in fits; they exit the barroom into the lights of the city, Fantine’s glow helping them find the way even through dark streets, her childlike laughter a bubble of electronic delight.

They are all amused by Fantine’s innocence, though in different ways. Dahlia and Zephine take it as simply laughable that Fantine seems to learn as slow as any child, perhaps even slower, in matters of the world – how she sighs and hums at a hurt animal, how seriously she takes some things, how little she knows of women and men! They laugh, Favourite scoffs.  It begins to irk her, like trying to teach a child unable to add two and two. Fantine is all sincerity and purity, and somehow the grime of the city never touches her. Somehow, she still stays gold and pearl, despite being neither – only plastic, only metal and silicon and porcelain.

How can a being composed of calculations be so guileless? Favourite wonders. There are simple sums: a foolish young woman, an older man. Fruitless passion rendered, minus limited devotion in return. A multiplication of errors, and thus disgrace.

But Fantine seems to give it no thought. And, after a while, Favourite stops thinking about it too. It’s none of her business what fools do, and other diversions offer more interest than the way some silly robot girl’s head works.

 

They take the early-morning shuttle one day to sample the delights of the off-planet pleasure station – a grand structure high in orbit, packed with rides that leave them spinning and dizzy and shrieking with laughter, greenhouses full of strange birds and enormous arching trees, snack-vendors at every corner and the view – such a view! They dine at a restaurant lined with glass, where the light is sunlight and starlight and moonlight all at once, and the planet wheels underneath them in majesty.

But there is something better waiting in store – though Favourite is growing impatient. “The surprise, Tholomyes?” she asks. She has already asked this more than once, always being met with a cocked eyebrow or an impish smile. The restaurant has settled down, their day is nearly over; the eight of them are almost alone at a table with an excellent view of the planet below them.

Tholomyes sets down his glass. “You’ve waited quite patiently,” he says, “and now it is time.”

Dahlia cheers, Zephine claps her hands. Blachevelle presses his lips to Favourite’s forehead and she keeps her arms folded, chin high. Fantine hums softly when Tholomyes kisses the top of her head.

“Come back soon,” she tells him.

The four men retreat, leaving behind half-empty glasses and a still-untouched dish of fritters. The four girls are left to view the starships that bustle back and forth between the satellite and the planet far below.

“I wonder what this surprise will be!” Zephine leans her head on Dahlia’s shoulder.

“Something pretty, I would hope.”

Fantine is watching something, chin resting on her hand, and the light catches her like a halo.

“Me, I hope it’ll be gold,” Favourite says.

 

**Author's Note:**

> what was really doing me in was that I couldn't figure out how to incorporate Cosette because I don't know how robots get pregnant also this needed like 10 million times the expansion but. orz


End file.
